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Yes, that's one aspect discussed in the podcast with Christian Drosten that is linked in the blog post. This is the relevant part: > We have a lot of experienc
by fabian2k 7y ago
Yes, that's one aspect discussed in the podcast with Christian Drosten that is linked in the blog post. This is the relevant part:
> We have a lot of experience. We have made the most precise description of an untreated patient cohort among the Munich patients. And at the Munich group, we saw how the virus concentration in both the throat and lungs behaved over time. And we can say that at the beginning of the disease the virus is in the throat and it goes away on its own through the - let's say - the first ten days of the disease. After that, many patients in the throat have little or only irregular evidence of the virus.
But that has nothing to do with how the virus behaves in the lungs. The virus is then really replicative in the lungs, especially in severe cases. And we can also say what the patient has in his throat, it has nothing to do with how the clinical development of the disease continues, whether the patient quickly gets well or only goes through a difficult phase. So what is being measured in this entire clinical study has nothing to do with the outcome of the disease, with the symptoms, but is only an initial indicator of how the disease starts. For all patients, the virus concentration drops in the first week, but if you now imagine that the group being treated will be included a little later and the untreated group being included earlier in this study, it is in nature the thing that with this group that was later included - they are already further in eliminating the virus from the throat - that the virus then goes down in the throat, faster. This disappears faster because they have simply been in the course of the disease for a long time. Whether this is due to the fact that they are treated, cannot be said at all from this entire study. Perhaps it would have been so if the groups had been put together as here, but if they hadn't given them chloroquine, but some headache pill, the study would have been the same.